The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

90 THE STORY OF "THE SUN"
winged lunarians with a combustible bundle of Abolition tracts, after vainly endeavoring to catch a long aim
at them with his rifle, is capital; as are also his puns
and jokes upon the splendid scenery of the Ruby Colosseum. Take it altogether, it is the most amusing thing
that has been on these boards for a long time.
Thus the moon eclipsed the regular stars of the New
York stage. Even Mrs. Duff, the most pathetic Isabella
that ever appeared in " The Fatal Marriage," saw her
audiences thin out at the Franklin Theatre. Sol Smith's
drolleries in " The Lying Valet," at the Park Theatre,
could not rouse the laughter that the burlesque manbats caused at the Bowery.
All this time there was a disappointed man in Baltimore; disappointed because the moon stories had
caused him to abandon one of the most ambitious stories
he had attempted. This was Edgar Allan Poe, and the
story he dropped was "Hans Pfaall."
In the spring of 1835 the Harpers issued an edition
of Sir John Herschel's " Treatise on Astronomy," and
Poe, who read it, was deeply interested in the chapter
on the possibility of future lunar investigations:
The theme excited my fancy, and I longed to give
free rein to it in depicting my day-dreams about the
scenery of the moon; in short, I longed to write a story
embodying these dreams. The obvious difficulty, of
course, was that of accounting for the narrator's acquaintance with the satellite; and the equally obvious
mode of surmounting the difficulty was the supposition
of an extraordinary telescope.
Poe spoke of this ambition to John Pendleton Kennedy, of Baltimore, already the author of " Swallow
Barn," and later to have the honour of writing, as the
result of a jest by Thackeray, the fourth chapter of
the second volume of "The Virginians." Kennedy